Our schools are being undermined by a constant rhetoric of decline
We should stop running down the manifest improvements in the country's education system
Matthew Taylor
The Observer, Sunday 2 September 2012
Welcome back to an exciting new school year for all of us here in the Department for Education. First, the good news: at long last, our examination results are down. With our planned changes to assessment and the focus on harder GCSEs we can predict even bigger declines in the years to come.
"This year will also see new grammar tests for 11-year-olds. We confidently expect initially poor results that will gradually improve asschoolslearn to teach to the test, leaving plenty of room for a future administration to respond to media charges that it has been dumbed down.
"This year, we will face many financial pressures. But we will not allow our commitment to turn all schools intoacademiesor free schools to be tempered by the fact that as more establishments convert the correlation between being an academy and achieving better results seems likely to disappear."
Being one of our most effective political orators (and operators) I am sure the secretary of state for education could find a more eloquent way of laying out his department's ambitious programme. Nor wouldMichael Govebe too worried about the apparent tensions between different policy goals. Indeed, like Tony Blair and New Labour's education guru Andrew Adonis, he would find accusations of inconsistency and irresponsibility emerging from the educational establishment as comforting evidence that he must be doing the right thing.
Behind differences of emphasis and method the central feature of political discourse about English education is the deeply held assumption that educational standards are falling and that we are lagging further behind the rest of the world. Under this assumption, anyone who questions any aspect of reform is quickly portrayed as an apologist for failure. In my time in Number 10, back in 2004, I remember being internally exiled for being heard to ask how the education department would cope when it was directly managing 200 academies (the figure is now in the thousands but the question still hasn't been answered).
The declinist narrative – what education expert Professor Stephen Ball called "the mobilising myth of education in crisis" – roughly tracks the loss of British influence in the world: 19th-century policy-makers were fretting about the higher skills of German workers. A key moment in more recent times wasJim Callaghan's powerful 1976 Ruskin Collegespeech in which he shocked the "secret garden" of the educational establishment by calling for a great debate on education standards, particularly the performance of working-class pupils. Since then, the rhetoric of decline and the pace of reform have accelerated hand in hand.
Much of what has changed since then has been for the better. Few would want to return to the days when headteachers had to get council approval before cutting the school's verges. Greater accountability, stronger inspection and more diversity among school providers have made major inroads into the long and fat tail of under-performing schools.
In the capital, the combination of national policy and theLondon Challengeprogramme has seen a city once plagued by failing establishments now among the highest national performers. The widespread recognition that teacher quality is the sine qua non of success is welcome as is the evidence that we have today the most accomplished teaching force ever.
Indeed, one of the problems with the assumption of decline is an unwillingness to identify success and also to recognise how the old establishment has, however grudgingly, adapted.
For example, most local authorities, of all political persuasions, have accepted that they have lost their empire and now have to find a role. I am leading an inquiry on school standards for Conservative Suffolk County Council, where local politicians have no desire to run schools but have a huge appetite for new ways to help them collaborate around improvement. Yet the other day I heard a backbench MP attribute "widespread" school underperformance to the dead hand of council control, a charge fast becoming as credible as blaming the Luftwaffe for our housing shortage.
The simple truth about educational attainment in England is that standards have risen significantly but not as quickly as a well-intentioned policy of improving exam performance. The evidence, albeit based on questionable data, of relegation in the international standards league table is of concern, but by far the greatest weakness of our system – huge class-related inequalities in outcome – is much more to do with factors outside school (economic inequality and the effect of parental choices) than inside.
Despite the political narrative, other countries think they have things to learn from us. TheRoyal Society of Artsis the proud sponsor of a small family of academies and the champion of a more collaborative, competency-based approach to children's learning. In the last two years, we have had a stream of visitors from countries, including China, exploring a move away from a focus on rote learning as employers increasingly demand the softer skills of creativity, self-confidence and teamwork.
Indeed, there is a major educational experiment taking place within the UK. The Scots are just finishing the decade-long implementation of a new, more flexible, child-centred and competency-based curriculum, backed by almost the whole educational establishment and provided by its monopoly of public sector schools overseen by local councils. There are no plans for academies, free schools or league tables.
I am no more a fan of public sector provider monopolies than an opponent of the principle of free schools, but spend time in a cross-section of English schools. It is impossible not to sense the demoralisation and insecurity caused by the steady drumbeat of negative rhetoric and continuous policy revolution.
Speaking when it was the liberal left who were driving reform, the Tory MP and educationalist Rhodes Boyson, who died last week, spoke of "a dangerous, neurotic desire for change". If Michael Gove wants to cock a snook at political orthodoxy he could use his forthcoming conference speech to commit to working with teachers, parents, local authorities, employers and upils, to build a long-term consensus for further steady improvement. That would be a radical break with the recent past.